Monet spent the summer of 1867 with his family at Sainte-Adresse, a seaside resort near Le Havre. It was there that he painted this buoyant, sunlit scene of contemporary leisure, enlisting his father (shown seated in a panama hat) and other relatives as models. By adopting an elevated viewpoint and painting the terrace, sea, and sky as three distinct bands of high-keyed color, Monet emphasized the flat surface of the canvas. His approach—daring for its time—reflects his admiration for Japanese prints. Twelve years after it was made, Monet exhibited the picture at the fourth Impressionist exhibition of 1879 as Jardin à Sainte-Adresse.

Catalogue Entry

The Painting: In the summer of 1867, Monet was spending time with his family at Sainte-Adresse, a seaside resort just north of Le Havre. It was a moment of great uncertainty in the painter’s life, yet we gain very little sense of that from this picture. In fact, this paean to sunlit days at the Normandy shore replete with sailboats, parasols, and flags flying strongly in the breeze tells more about the highly-ordered holiday time of the French bourgeoisie in the 1860s.

A gray-bearded gentleman modeled by Monet’s own father, Adolphe, sits mostly with his back to us in a Panama hat accompanied by a fashionable woman in a black-accented white dress and parasol, also seated in one of the bentwood caned chairs in the foreground. She is often said to represent Sophie Lecadre, the wife of Adolphe-Aimé Lecadre, one of three nephews of Monet’s aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre and her then deceased husband, Jacques (Baillio 2010, p. 59 n. 4). The pair look out to the younger couple at the edge of the water, she in another highly fashionable white dress with red trimming and parasol and he more formally dressed than Monet’s father, in a top hat and black jacket. She has been identified as Sophie’s daughter, Jeanne-Marguerite, and he is generally thought to be Sophie’s husband, Dr. Adolphe-Aimé Lecadre, or another male relative (Baillio 2010, p. 57). Both men carry walking sticks. This foursome is surrounded by greenery punctuated throughout by flowers in red and yellow hues and whites that echo the white dresses. Gladiolas, geraniums, and nasturtiums naturally occurring in varying reds unite here in one bright red tone. The French tricolore (the tri-colored red, white, and blue flag of France) flies high at right, while at left is a red and yellow flag, either a local sailing club’s colors or, possibly, the Spanish flag’s colors to honor Maria Cristina de Borbón, the widow of Ferdinand VII of Spain who lived then in a nearby villa (Salinger 1970). Two people sit on a sailboat with three sails near the younger couple, and more boats with sails down are moored at left. Farther out at sea lie larger ships, including steamers that paint the sky with grey smoke. Even in this relatively early work, the painter naturalistically presents smokestacks (the mucky element of then-modern global trade’s steamships), just as he would later show factory smokestacks beyond scenes of bourgeois leisure at Argenteuil in the 1870s. The clear sky gets cloudier as it reaches both the horizon line and the ships’ smoke. The long shadows cast by the sun just beyond the picture frame to the left of the scene betray that the hour presented is a late afternoon languorous one. Still, Monet’s father sits erectly in his seat, alert to any hint he may glean of the nature of the interaction at center.

The picture is organized in three color bands dominated by the light blue sky, darker blue sea, and greens of the foreground, which are complemented by the inclusion of the tricolore. This manner of creating a seaside composition dominated by three-tiered horizontal planes was not new. Monet’s informal teacher Eugène Boudin, whom Monet had met in 1856–57 and from whom he learned to paint out-of-doors, had been painting images of the seaside with a tripartite structure for a few years already. (For example, see Boudin’s On the Beach, Dieppe of 1864 [The Met, 2003.20.1] and Princess Pauline Metternich (1836–1921) on the Beach of 1865–67 [The Met, 1999.288.1].) What was new was the integration of eye-popping colors into and a flatter representation of the three structuring bands. Monet’s source for these kinds of colors was Japanese ukiyo-e prints. His use of an elevated bird’s eye view was also a product of looking at the prints of Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai. (The painter appears to have placed his easel next to a second-floor window of a villa to achieve this vantage point.) Later, Monet recalled to an art dealer, "at the time this composition was considered daring" (Gimpel 1966). Specifically regarding his use of color, critic Théodore Duret wrote in 1880, "Among our landscape painters Claude Monet was the first to have the boldness to go as far as the Japanese in the use of color" (Duret 1880).

It was fairly common at this time to conflate Japanese and Chinese sources, and, in a letter to fellow painter Jean-Frédéric Bazille of December 1868–January 1869, Monet requested that Bazille send him several of his own canvases, including "le tableau chinois où il ya des drapeaux" (the Chinese painting with flags), referring to this painting (Wildenstein 1974, vol. 1, p. 426, L 45). In August 1869, Auguste Renoir wrote to Bazille of The Met’s picture as "le Japonais aux petits drapeaux" (the Japanese one with little flags) (Wildenstein 1974, vol. 1, p. 445, L 26). It is clear from both Monet’s and Renoir’s ways of referring to the picture that both the artist and his friends recognized Eastern influences on his Western painting. Japanese prints were avidly collected by Monet, Renoir, Edouard Manet, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Félix Bracquemond, and others in their circle. While Monet’s claim to have begun collecting Japanese prints as early as 1856 may have been an exaggeration (Elder 1924), by 1867 he may well have already owned the print by Hokusai that appears to have inspired this painting (first proposed in House 1986). Japonneries were already circulating among these artists and their writer-friends like Charles Baudelaire and Arsène Houssaye by 1861, according to Stuckey (1995, p. 188), and the artist-writer Zacharie Astruc listed Monet among fellow Japoniste devotees by 1868, calling him a "faithful emulator of Hoksai [sic]" (Astruc, "Le Japon chez nous," 1868, cited in Spate and Bromfield 2001). The print by Hokusai from Monet’s collection remains today in Monet’s home at Giverny; another impression of the same print is in The Met’s collection (JP2984).

It has been noted of Monet’s and his contemporaries’ representations of current ladies’ fashions in the 1860s that they were attempts at "an expression of the timeliness and ephemeral nature of a moment in the vie moderne" (modern life) (Haase 2012, p. 99). In The Met’s picture, there is more focus on the fashion worn by the figures at the water’s edge than in their facial features; in fact, the artist has left the woman’s face completely free of features and barely hinted at eyes and a mouth on the male figure. The seaside promenade ensemble with a scalloped-edged jacket and full skirt worn by the woman was most probably made of cotton piqué, as that was the fabric most recommended for comfort while walking at the seaside (Haase 2012, p.90, cat. 36). As Birgit Haase has explained, "white dresses both occasioned and expressed a leisurely, refined existence, revealing a feminine ideal"; white dresses meant the wearer stayed far from physical work and dirt (Haase 2012, p. 104).

Monet exhibited this picture at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879 as "Jardin à Sainte-Adresse" (Garden at Sainte-Adresse). By 1915, it was exhibited in San Francisco under the title "Le Havre: terrasse au bord de la mer" (Le Havre: Terrace at the Seaside) and at the New York World’s Fair in 1940 as "Harbor near Havre." Both "terrace" and "Le Havre" stuck in the title until "Le Havre" was replaced by the original "Sainte-Adresse" when on exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1960. The return to "Garden" rather than "Terrace" came with the unearthing of the catalogue for its original exhibition in 1879 with research for the groundbreaking exhibition "The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886" in 1986. The painting has been called "the single most important seascape from the first decade of his career" (Orr 2006).

The Picturesque and the Bourgeoisie: Monet had spent time during many summers since his childhood along the shores of Sainte-Adresse, the site of the family summer villa. The villa still exists today in a rebuilt form (Orr 2006). The villa from which Monet painted must not have been his aunt’s, though, as it is impossible to see the water from that site; instead, period maps and photographs have led scholars to identify the site as a terrace previously situated near the modern Alphonse-Karr path (Wildenstein 1996 and Orr 2006). Rather than paint from the family villa that lacked a waterfront view, Monet chose to paint facing southwest from the hillside looking across (at left) to the distant hills of Calvados. That this more famous Sainte-Adresse seaside view was a picturesque one with restorative powers for summer inhabitants and tourists alike was not lost on Monet, who explored the locale in other canvases that summer as well. The Met’s own Regatta at Sainte-Adresse (51.30.4) and Woman in the Garden. Sainte-Adresse (see Additional Images, fig. 1) both were painted at the seaside village that season, the latter showing a similarly dressed woman in a promenading costume and parasol in the well-tended family flower garden and the former filled with sailboats and beach dwellers along the shore. Monet surely knew that such images had real sales potential, tapping into the vogue for picturesque land- and seascapes for the homes of the Parisian bourgeoisie (not to mention much of Europe in the period). Two others from that summer are Adolphe Monet Reading in a Garden (private collection), in which his father wears the same Panama hat, and Flowering Garden (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).

While Monet’s family members seem to be enjoying an idyllic moment at the seaside, the biographical record reveals an undercurrent of family strife. Monet’s mistress Camille was pregnant that summer, and the painter’s family strongly disapproved of the situation. His father had made an ultimatum regarding the funding of Monet’s young existence as a painter, stating that he must forget Camille and the baby. The younger Monet dutifully came to Sainte-Adresse that summer in an effort to appease his family, but he was uncertain of how he would reconcile his family’s wishes and his own desire to recognize both Camille and his future child. (Jean-Armand-Claude Monet was born on August 8, 1867.) In this canvas, though, there is no hint of this dilemma. All is serene and in keeping with bourgeois appearances. The sheer force of bourgeois convention overwhelms the image, bringing the artist to the regimented tripartite composition and figures who remain decorously distant from one another. Whether each figure is to be firmly identified as a particular member of Monet’s family or not, "all of these figures are merely actors, punctuating the scene with their presence," according to one scholar (Tinterow 1994). Indeed, the ignominious facts of Monet’s life in the summer of 1867 might as well have been a distant tale played out by others.

According to House 1986, Monet removed two boats that were originally in the scene. An archive x-radiograph suggests that there may have been three additional boats in the middle distance that were painted out by the artist. In addition, there was originally another stem of flowers to the right of the flagpole at the left of the composition, along with some small compositional adjustments.

[2016]

Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings

Inscription: Signed (lower right): Claude Monet

Provenance

Victor Frat, Montpellier (probably before 1870–at least 1879; bought from the artist); his widow, Mme Frat, Montpellier (until 1913; sold on April 16 for Fr 27,000 to Durand-Ruel, Paris); [Durand-Ruel, Paris, 1913; stock no. 3653; transferred on May 12 to Durand-Ruel, New York]; [Durand-Ruel, New York, 1913–26; sold on June 4, 1926 for $11,500 to Pitcairn]; Reverend Theodore Pitcairn and the Beneficia Foundation, Bryn Athyn, Pa. (1926–67; sale, Christie's, London, December 1, 1967, no. 26 to Thomas Agnew & Son for MMA)

New York. Wildenstein. "A Loan Exhibition of Paintings by Claude Monet for the Benefit of the Children of Giverny," April 11–May 12, 1945, no. 6 (as "La Terrasse au Havre," lent by the Rev. Theodore Pitcairn).

René Gimpel. Diary of an Art Dealer. English ed. New York, 1966, p. 152, relates that Monet at one time showed him a photograph of one of the artist's paintings depicting his father looking out to sea, with a flagpole on either side of the composition, said to be in America, presumably this work; states that Monet sold it for Fr 400 to Pratt, whose widow sold it for Fr 40,000 to Durand-Ruel, from whom Monet wanted to buy it back; adds that Monet mentioned that "at the time this composition was considered very daring".

Charles Merrill Mount. Monet, a biography. New York, 1966, pp. 142–43, 405, 407, claims that Monet painted this scene from a window; identifies each of the four figures depicted; believes a painting now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris (W69) to have been the picture included in the fourth Impressionist exhibition of 1879 as no. 157, not this work.

John Rewald. The History of Impressionism. 4th rev. ed. New York, 1973, pp. 152–53, ill. (color), dates it about 1867 and states that it was painted on the property of Monet's family, identifying the figure in the right foreground as the artist's father.

Charles F. Stuckey, ed. Monet: A Retrospective. New York, 1985, pp. 38, 45, 100, 273, 310, colorpl. 13, quotes various comments, including the incorrect connection of it to a description by Émile Zola and the assertion that it was shown at the Salon of 1865 as "The Terrace at Sainte-Adresse".

Shunsuke Kijima. Monet. Tokyo, 1985, unpaginated, fig. 6 (color).

Michael Clarke. Lighting up the Landscape: French Impressionism and its Origins. Exh. cat., National Gallery of Scotland. Edinburgh, 1986, p. 72.

John House. Monet: Nature into Art. New Haven, 1986, pp. 15–16, 47, 49, 51, 114–15, 136, 188, 235 n. 6, p. 237 n. 22, colorpl. 67, compares the composition to Hokusai's "The Sazaido of the Gohyaku Rakan-ji Temple," of which Monet owned a print, and to Millet's "The End of the Village of Gréville" (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), exhibited at the 1866 Salon; mentions that Monet removed two additional boats originally included in the scene.

Robert L. Herbert. Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society. New Haven, 1988, pp. 291–93, fig. 297, comments on the ships, remarking that there are boats representative of both older and newer time periods and that the various nautical vessels illustrate marine commerce and prosperity, as well as the juxtaposition of traditional working life at Sainte-Adresse and the vacation spot it was becoming when this picture was painted; suggests that the view over the English Channel represents Monet's alliance to the modernity of contemporary painters instead of the tradition of academic artists.

Virginia Spate. Claude Monet: Life and Work. New York, 1992, pp. 48–49, 59, 83, 87, 144, fig. 45 (color), suggests that the empty chairs represent Monet's feeling of isolation from his family members, who were unhappy with his unmarried relationship with Camille Doncieux.

Chuji Ikegami. New History of World Art. Vol. 22, Period of Impressionism. Tokyo, 1993, fig. 107.

Charles F. Stuckey. Claude Monet, 1840–1926. Exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago, 1995, pp. 33, 204, 245–46, no. 11, colorpl. 11, notes that no review of the 1879 exhibition [see Exh. Paris 1879] mentions it, and suggests that despite its entry in the catalogue, it may not have been shown; dates the Durand-Ruel Gallery exhibition in New York to February 1–16, 1914 [but see Ref. Wildenstein 1974].

Clare A. P. Willsdon. In the Gardens of Impressionism. New York, 2004, pp. 24, 51, 86–88, 90, 94, 111, colorpl. 87, identifies the specific types of flowers depicted as geraniums, nasturtiums, and gladioli; suggests that Monet may have chosen to paint these particular flowers for their significance based on the nineteenth-century code of floral meanings.

Dominique Lobstein. Monet et Londres. 2004, pp. 8–9, ill. (color).

Lynn Federle Orr inMonet in Normandy. Exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. New York, 2006, pp. 62–64, 183, no. 6, ill. pp. 1 (color), 63, dates it to the summer of 1867, and from period maps and photographs locates the terrace as previously situated near the modern Alphonse-Karr path.

Michael J. Call. Claude Monet, Free Thinker: Radical Republicanism, Darwin's Science, and the Evolution of Impressionist Aesthetics. New York, 2015, pp. 78–79, states that Monet's early Normandy coast pictures, including this one, are painted from the viewpoint of the tourist and that nature is presented as a consumable object existing for the benefit of the humans, who are painted "large in scale and importance".